Throwback Thursday – A Reactor Vessel’s Arrival

In these photos, a reactor vessel is being towed (and then arrives) at the barge dock of an East Coast nuclear power plant site circa 1971 Can you name the power plant? Photo courtesy of the Department of Energy

Reactor Vessel Coming & Going
Good job Steven. So this is a throwback pic of a new reactor pressure vessel (RPV) heading to Calvert Cliffs in Maryland. To provide balance to this blog I found a picture of a used RPV leaving a reactor site on a barge. I tried to upload the pic but it didn’t work. The used RPV looked pretty benign on its barge, all wrapped up in a blue covering. This used RPV (on a barge on the Columbia River) was sealed and shielded & was from the defunct Trojan Nuclear Power Plant, which ceased operation after only 17 years. By disposing of the Trojan RPV in one piece the contractor said he saved 19 million dollars. For some reason the total cost for disposal was not mentioned?! This used RPV contained two million curies of radioactivity, and that amount does not include the radioactive fuel that was removed before the used RPV was shipped. To get a feel for just how much radioactivity this two million curies is, I offer a couple of comparisons…
• The Curie-Meter-Rem Rule-this rule estimates the radiation dose rate one meter from a one-curie radiation source. At one meter from a one curie radiation source the dose rate is one Rem per hour. So after only five hours a radiation worker would receive his maximum allowable yearly dose of radiation. So even one Curie is a huge amount of radioactivity.
• The Los Alamos Lab offsite radioactivity recovery project recently celebrated a milestone. Since 1999 they have recovered more than one million curies of radioactivity from 38,000 radioactive sources from 1,100 different locations in the fifty states.
Therefore the radioactivity in the used Trojan RPV alone was two times the amount of radioactivity recovered in over 15 years by the lab’s recovery project!
Guess where this barge discharged its radioactive cargo? In a shallow land fill grave on the Washington state Hanford Reservation. The land fill that it is said,”…poses unique problems due to its close proximity to the Columbia River.”
Such is another chapter in our nuclear power plant legacy series.

Thanks Cap!
The NRC is indeed a salesman, but more like a used car salesman. Even nuke plant owners are trying to unload these old nuke plant dinosaurs. Some typical lines they are using now…
Used Nuke Plant Salesman: Worth every penny!
Translation: Every penny is one cent that is what it’s worth.
Used Nuke Plant Salesman: Last year’s model!
Translation: Everyone else found its faults, can you?
Used Nuke Plant Salesman: Dealer Demo!
Translation: We tried it, we’re unloading it.
Used Nuke Plant Salesman: These are getting hard to find!
Translation: Scrap metal prices keep going up.
Used Nuke Plant Salesman: “Is price important to you?”
Utility Buyer: “No, charge me whatever you want, the ratepayers are footing the bill.”
Used Nuke Plant Salesman: The nuke plant of your dreams!
Translation: You remember these dreams, waking up with your heart racing, don’t you?

When I was a consultant, my company had a doublewide trailer on the road to the intake structure and walked down to that very dock at lunch time. When we would look back up the road, the trees on the top of the bluff is exactly what we saw. Sometimes it’s not so bad being in this business since 1976.

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